The first figure strides purposefully out of the bushes. Dressed head-to-toe in camouflage fatigues he is likely the guide.
Six more people follow, some looking down at the trail as they go, each carrying a rucksack.
Maybe they are migrants, maybe they are drug mules, said Tim Foley, founder of Arizona Border Recon, a volunteer group of mostly military veterans who are trying to plug the holes in the frontier with Mexico.
{snip}
‘These are the ones that aren’t just going to hand themselves into Border Patrol.’
There is a pattern to the movement. The cartel that controls the crossings is not even waiting for darkness, but sending people through between four and six in the afternoon.
It was almost 4pm as Foley, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division, watched the video on his laptop.
He quickly gathered his men, forming them into two squads to head out for observation missions. They left, chambering rounds in their assault rifles with a loud clacking as they went.
The men have no authority to make arrests, but for years they have patrolled a network of trails around what they call ‘Baby’s Head Gap.’ The other side of the hill is run by the Sinaloa dug cartel, which uses gaps in the border wall to send migrants and drugs on to American soil.
If they spot someone crossing the border illegally, Foley’s men will chase them down and stay with them until Border Patrol can arrive.
This area of dried creeks and cactus-studded hills is far from the nearest legal crossing. And the vast bulk of illegal arrivals are delivered by their coyotes — or guides — elsewhere along the border, such as close to Lukeville, where DailyMail.com saw more than 550 people making their way through holes cut in the border wall in a little over an hour last Thursday.
{snip}
Last month the total number of ‘encounters’ along the entire border hit a new record of 270,000.
The arrivals are fewer and further between around Baby’s Head Gap. But Foley, who finances operations by working as a carpenter for the rest of the year, points to the time he passed trail cam footage to law enforcement officers and it made its way up to the Pentagon.
He had caught a Syrian national on camera who turned out to be on a terror watch list. He was arrested six weeks later in Washington D.C.
At other times their mission is more humanitarian. Last year they came across two young women who had been directed across the border and told to meet someone in Tucson.
When asked how much their passage had cost — often as much as $5000 — they said they had paid nothing. For the veterans of Arizona Border Recon, that meant they were almost certainly destined for the sex trade.
Other times Foley’s team is a straightforward deterrent. On a recent patrol they ran into about 20 armed men close to 50ft gap in the border wall that is one of the cartel’s favorite entry points.
‘They saw us in our gear and with our weapons and must have thought we were federal,’ said Ryan, an eight-year veteran with Arizona Border Recon. ‘They turned and left.’
{snip}
They established their base in a natural depression, hiding them from people arriving from Mexico.
After setting up a communications antenna, they headed out on a patrol of their patch, checking in on trail cameras and scanning for sight of cartel scouts on hills across the border.
As he walked, with a Bushmaster rifle slung across his chest, Foley said he was playing three games at once with the cartel.
‘First is hide and seek. So we have to come out and find them. That’s what the cameras afford. And that’s what tracking also does for you,’ he said.
‘Once you find them, then it turns into a game of chess. I put my pieces in front of their pieces to block their movement, and then they try to get around us.
‘The third one is Whac-a-Mole. When you hit them there, and they pop up over here, and you hit them there and they pop up over here.’
There were fresh footprints along one of the trails. One set ran into Arizona, another ran back out — perhaps a guide heading back to Mexico.
Foley pointed out a shoe abandoned beside the trail. Its sole was covered with carpet, a trick designed to foil trackers.
That has not stopped Foley becoming a thorn in the Sinaloa cartel’s side since he launched his patrols in 2011.
{snip}
‘”We will tell you when the load is coming in that you can grab,'” said the caller, according to Foley. ‘”And then we’ll tell you a load to leave alone.
‘And I said, so why would you give your nemesis guns, ammo, body armor. He says: “Well, you wouldn’t be our enemy.”‘
Foley turned them down along with an offer of $15,000-a-month to let them know where Arizona Border Recon was operating. For his refusal, the bounty on his head more than doubled.
‘Well then they call back again and say, well, the boss is pissed off.’ said Foley.
‘You just went from $100,000 to $250,000.’
Foley has had a mixed reception on his own side of the border, where senior law enforcement officials take a dim view of armed men launching unsanctioned operations.
‘I don’t give much credence to any of these outfits,’ one former official told DailyMail.com, suggesting they were more interested in having fun and reliving their military days than really making a difference.
For his part, Foley said he generally got more support from rank-and-file agents than the top brass, who worried their inability to police the border was being exposed.
‘I’ve been called everything: racist, vigilante, Nazi, domestic terrorist, extremist,’ he said.
‘If getting off my couch and doing something for the country makes me an extremist then call me an extremist.
‘What should I be doing? Watching ‘Dancing with the Stars”‘
* Original Article:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12688899/amp/border-militia-patrol-Arizona-migrant-immigration-crisis.html?ito=smartnews